Taking you from WANTING to be a great presenter to BEING one

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About Whole-Brain Presenting

Whole-Brain Presenting is a website dedicated to my personal crusade/mission of ridding the world of boring, pedestrian, ineffective business presentations. I run both open and in-house seminars throughout the UK and the US to take people from wantingto be a great presenter to actually beingone.

We are public speaking and presentation skills training specialists. We’re not a training company that offers courses on everything under the sun and simply drops presentation skills on to the list as an afterthought. We don’t do anything else. As a wise man once said, ‘Everyone is a specialist nowadays; generalists are just specialists in being superficial.’

Our approach is unique, and has three main elements. 1. Presentations need to easily accepted and understood by the human brain. Most, unfortunately, aren’t. They’re aimed at the Neocortex – the thinking, rational, analytical part of the audience’s brains – but never actually get there because they’re intercepted along the way and rejected by the more primitive ‘Lizard Brain’ whose sole function is to look out for threats. Unless your message is deliberately crafted to be non-threatening, interesting/novel/unusual and simple, it’s almost doomed to fail.

2. Presentations need process – No matter what your job , it’s a fair bet that you have strict processes to follow (often ‘laid down in stone’ in manuals thick enough to be used as a door stop). Processes that ensure that – providing you religiously follow the steps from A through Z – a quality ‘X’ will result every single time (where ‘X’ is whatever product or service your department is responsible for). And the reason we all do this is because following processes – by and large – works. So we do it in everything.

Everything, that is . . . except designing presentations. Here, most people – even in this day and age – ‘wing it,’ gathering a number of slides already used in previous ones, shuffling them into some sort of order and then giving them a quick scan, muttering to themselves ‘OK . . .with this slide I’ll say something about the competition . . . then I’ll move on to cost with this one . . . and when I use this one I’ll talk about timescale “ etc., etc.

I’ll introduce you to an 8-step structure which will give you a logical, step-by-step process you can follow – just like you do in every other aspect of your job – which will ensure you have as much chance as is humanly possible to achieve your objective.

3. Your choice of wordsmatters. Your presentation is neither your slides, nor your personal performance when you get on your feet. It’s the verbal argument you use. Your ‘performance’ and your slides are no more than ways to get that argument across to the audience.

Most modern languages have an enormous and incredibly rich vocabulary, and there are probably about twenty different ways you could make any single point. One of which will be better than the other nineteen.

Now ask yourself a question. What are the chances that at the very moment you’re in the spotlight and under pressure, your brain will scan all the various options and land on that one? Not very high, I think you’ll admit. If you want to use the one that’s better than the other nineteen, you have to give careful thought to it and decide what it will be in advance.

Choose one set of words and you achieve your objective. Choose a different set and you don’t. Choose one set and you get the potential customer and win the sale. Choose a different set and you’re shown the door. It’s as simple as that. I’ll show you how to choose words and phrases that will burn your message into your audience’s brains.

People aren’t born great presenters. They become them. It’s true that some people are gifted with great speaking voices or have natural, unshakable confidence, but these alone will never make them a great presenter. The few awe-inspiring, eloquent, articulate, confident presenters you’ve seen and heard over the years weren’t always like that. They’ve become like that through practice, training and preparation. Just as you can.